


wine, cheese, wine and cheese

by soundofez



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: F/M, Fluff, SoMa Week, SoMa Week 2016, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-03 01:53:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6591859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundofez/pseuds/soundofez
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there's something</p><p>in the things you said under the stars and in the grass</p><p>in the way you said <em>I love you</em> on a sunny Tuesday afternoon with the late sunlight glowing in your hair</p><p>in the fragments of time and space between our breaths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. things you said under the stars and in the grass

Pre-K hunting is different at night. There's something about the chill in the air, perhaps; the crispness, the petrichor-like note in the air.

Maka moves in quick, precise steps, bird-like, but her grip on him is firm and unwavering. (Not stiff— that's a rookie mistake, to be controlling, to be stifling, a mistake that makes meister and weapon souls grate against one another, a mistake that costs partnerships.)

Awareness is different in weapon form. He doesn't have physical eyes, not really, no matter what his tang looks like, and he can't see Maka, exactly, but he knows where she is, how she flits over the ground, casting a faint shadow under her in the clear night.

"The stars are really bright tonight," Soul says unthinkingly.

He sees/senses/feels Maka glance up. "It's a new moon," she observes.

* * *

Maka flops onto the brittle grass of the training grounds, her breath short, as he drops beside her. Through resonance, he can feel the faintest sensation of dry, scratchy grass, prickling unforgivingly at the back of her neck.

He shifts out of weapon form, inhaling deeply to a crouch, elbows hanging off his thighs, hands dangling, head upturned, because his focus was skywards before the shift. Resonance doesn't tax him physically, but there's a mental load that translates to breathlessness when he's not in weapon form.

"You wanna try again?" he asks after a moment of panting and squinting at the too-bright sky.

Maka picks herself up wordlessly and dusts off her coat. He grins up at her determined expression and transforms to her offered hand.

* * *

Away from the lights of Death City, (away from the lights of any city really,) the stars stand especially prominently against a dark canvas of night sky. The moon is new again, a starless patch of space.

"We're dating, aren't we?" Maka asks, suddenly and bluntly.

Soul considers, his eyes tracing the swath of stars on Orion's Belt. "If you say so," he answers at length.

Maka sits up, but her head is still tilted upward. "That's good," she says quietly.

Soul sits up, too. His hand lifts to her hair, picking away a shred of soft green grass clinging to a pigtail. "Yeah," he says simply, and rests his chin on her shoulder.

"Your chin is sharp," she complains, but doesn't move.

He can hear the grin in her voice and rolls his head sideways anyways, leaning instead of perching. "So's your tongue," he retorts, but his voice is as unheated as hers.

"Is not. I'll prove it, if you like," she replies, and her head tilts toward him just so.

"What're we betting?" he asks, or mutters, or mumbles, his lips barely moving as they brush, somehow, at the corner of hers. He's not sure when he stopped looking at the sky and started looking at her eyes, which glitter with stars just the same.

"Does it matter?" she murmurs back, and the distance between their mouths vanish.

He forgets to take stock of the shape of her tongue, too distracted by the feel of it, foreign yet comforting against his own. He says as much, and she barters another kiss for the knowledge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally posted to tumblr [2015 Nov 28](http://soundofez.tumblr.com/post/134160928043/).


	2. the way you said "I love you" on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, the late sunlight glowing in your hair.

He hates having to flag down passersby on the street to ask for directions, hates being lost in a foreign place and feeling like a sore thumb, hates being a _tourist_. It’s for Maka that he braves the world the way he does, and for Maka that he’s here, and for Maka that he stays. It’s for Maka, who is bright and bold and so, so brave, and sometimes Soul can barely look at her, and sometimes Soul can barely see anything else.

Like now, as stained glass windows color her eyes only to vanish like ghosts when she turns to him. “Are you okay?” she asks, too loudly, cutting through the sermon.

He blinks. “Huh?”

She gestures loosely around them. “I didn’t realize until we were inside, but it looks like Italy.”

They’re gathering dirty looks from the churchgoers around them, the ones who are actually here for service and are probably convinced that Soul, with his white hair and red eyes and pointed teeth, is a demon, and ordinarily Soul would shrink into himself, would distance himself as much as possible from his companion, would suffer the scrutiny of society in silence, but his companion is Maka, and so instead he pulls them from the sanctuary and returns the dirty looks they’ve collected with apologetic nods.

“It’s really beautiful,” Maka sighs, looking wistfully back at the hall they’ve only just escaped.

“We could come back,” Soul suggests quietly.

“What? But—”

“When it’s not Sunday service,” he expands, a grin tugging at one end of his lips. “Emptier. So no one’ll yell at you for being too loud.”

Maka grins back. “Yeah, okay,” she says, and leans up to press a kiss to his cheek. “Thanks,” she mumbles, her breath whispering across his skin and inspiring shivers in its wake. “For coming with me.”

* * *

He does not stir when she slips out of his arms, but he is distantly aware of fading footsteps and water rushing through pipes hidden inside the thin walls of their apartment. He’s caught in the space between awareness and dreams, paralyzed with encroaching dread held at bay with stillness and time, terrified that she won’t come back.

He won’t chase her if she leaves. He can’t.

But she comes back, creeping under his covers (their covers) with a rush of cold air, and he grumbles and laces his fingers in her reaching ones and folds her into his embrace, his arm pinned under her narrow waist. Her scent is buried in the crook of her neck under his nose, soothing and constant under the sterile smell of porcelain and product that has followed her from the bathroom.

The skin over her collarbone is soft under his lips. The week is barely begun, and their relationship is both old and new, and he is astonished that he can still be beside her.

* * *

How many times have they walked down the enormous staircase of the DWMA? How long has it been? It’s been years since they graduated, years since he’s been with Maka in this place, in this enormous space, but there is sunlight bleaching a halo in Maka’s hair and blinding him and though nothing has changed, something is different.

She catches him when he forgets to watch his feet. “So uncool,” she teases.

“Just means I have the coolest meister,” he scoffs back. The logic is lateral— she’s cooler than him, sure, for catching him, sure, but also for just _staying with him_. She’s the coolest, and he loves her.

He’s certain Maka can’t hear his thoughts, but she blushes anyway, and then it’s his turn to catch her in a rare moment when he is more dexterous than she. He wonders how at fault he is for that and doesn’t let go of her.

She doesn’t try to escape, either. His hands remain on her shoulders while they inspect one another, until Soul doesn’t know who is steadying whom. Her eyelashes flicker, highlighted by sunbeams and so much longer than he remembers them being. Nothing has changed since they kissed under the stars and in the grass, since they acknowledged that they are partners in more ways than as weapon and meister (not _merely_ weapon and meister, not _merely_ when their resonance ties them more deeply than _merely_ implies).

Nothing has changed, but something is different.

Maka scoots closer than she already is, leaning up as he leans down.

Her lips are soft.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from [a prompt on tumblr](http://soundofez.tumblr.com/post/143331475228/) coupled with SoMa Week 2016: Day 1, Types of Kisses.


	3. the fragments of time and space between our breaths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is now ludicrously late, but it is in fact written for **SoMa Week 2016, Day 7: Just Kiss Already**.

It's considered standard for a weapon to be good at multitasking. It comes like breathing, from the necessity of filtering through the layers of awareness that come with weapon form, with the intuitive understanding of what goes on around their flesh meisters while the weapons are encased in demon steel.

It means that Soul is both easily overstimulated and frequently under-stimulated. Crowds are too noisy, perfumes and colognes too strong, movies too long, and when he's trapped in a theatre unable to escape to the bathroom or kitchen every half hour, he comes out with a pounding headache brought on by too many sudden transitions between light and dark and noise and silence. By contrast, a selection of friends is comfortable, hair products subtly fascinating, video games engaging but also easy to disengage from, and Soul particularly favors playing Minecraft on easy or creative mode to _breathe_ , safe from the monsters he has to fight in real life.

His room is silent only when he's absent, the window cracked open for fresh air when it's not closed to keep out the heat, and once he's past his poorly-conceived "cool" phase he strips his walls of the ridiculous band posters and tapes up empty staff paper above his headboard to catch angry black notes on restless nights. He never fully connects the controversial, chaotic complexity of his compositions to the layers upon layers of information that he processes as a weapon, but music was and remains how he vents his quiet resentment toward his family.

Soul picks out her vague attraction/longing for him through resonance, of all things, though never consciously. In the middle of battle, it's just another data point, automatically categorized and filed away into whatever convoluted mental system Soul and his fellow weapons employ to deal with the overload of information. Their intimacy creeps up on both of them, so that they go from separate couch cushions and blanket wars whenever they have to share a bed to single, fluid tangles and thoughtless, natural kisses. No one can pin down the precise date they start anything, least of all themselves. Sex is the same way: a natural progression of kissing, caressing, exploring one another's body until even their official first time is a mystery that neither of them care to explain.

The first time he and Maka sleep together, brought together by nightmares and a need for comfort rather than by carnal intimacy, Soul does his best to trap his melodies in his mind to keep from disturbing her rest. They make the nights harder for him, at first, but Maka notices eventually that the bags under his eyes are darker, and she huffs, indignant: "I thought the whole _point_ was that we'd sleep better together, not worse." That night she pokes his shoulder, gently, at ten-minute intervals to whisper, "Asleep yet?"

She falls asleep before he does anyway, but her squeaking snores inspire him to wriggle carefully from her embrace and pen the notes that haunt him. He's asleep within the hour in spite of a cramping hand, and wakes to Maka's hand on his shoulder late the following morning. "Sleep well?"

There's still a balance to be struck: Maka can try to fall asleep while he composes, but she's only successful half the time. Still, she sleeps like a log, and when he wakes in the middle of the night he takes full advantage of this. Besides, she likes looking up and seeing the changes he's made overnight, likes the ordered chaos that springs up on pristine lines, and she tells him so.

(She writes poetry about it, too, but he never gets to read any of it. It's fine: he figures the words on her breath in their most private moments together are poetry enough for him.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired in no small part by [an ask for headcanons on tumblr](http://soundofez.tumblr.com/post/143925746143/), and is of course for **SoMa Week 2016, Day 7: Just Kiss Already**. for a more platonic take, see also: [nightmares](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6353728/chapters/16994397).


End file.
